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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

In the case of cars often a car can tow, but it shouldn't. I know someone who burned out a transmission because the trailer was overweight (in this case it was a truck that the manual said max tow weight was 1/4th what he was towing). I haven't seen it myself, but my EMT friends have had to respond to cases where someone was towing

I work for John Deere, it is well known that ECU code can change the horse power of our tractors. What isn't as well known is the tractors with higher horsepower ECUs have more warranty work, and that is a case where we engineer the system for the change (there is more than an ECU changed in getting higher horsepower if you buy it that way from us because we don't want warranty claims)

If you know what the real limits of your system are you will sometimes discover the stated limits are less than the real limits. However other times the stated limits are there for a reason.

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Often it's also for regulatory reasons, particularly around emissions. Larger engines require more complex emission controls, so often an engine (including e.g. a JD) will be sold with a nameplate of say 74hp and chip-limited. It could very likely get its maximum efficiency at that output.

We have a vendor that sells equipment with a built-in engine, and we use some of the power from that engine to run other equipment. Under Tier-4 emissions requirements the vendor moved to all-digital controls, which have a much tighter control on power output. Our customers are annoyed that they can't get the same amount of power out of the new equipment. Our vendor tells us, unofficially, you could tweak the ECU and get more power out, but we're not going to do that to equipment we're selling, and we're not going to tell our customers to do that, because it would violate the legal restrictions on The operation of that equipment.

idk... John Deere is notorious for DRMing their tractors so that even out of warranty modifications or repairs are impossible. It should be up to the user to be able to do the modifications they like and it's simply then up to the manufacturer whether to honor the warranty if the device/tractor has been significantly tampered with.

I'm not going to comment much except to point out that it is fraud if you do such a thing and then sell/trade it in - the mechanical damage is done and the buyer should know - but has no way to know.

I'll also point out that you probably were mad at VW for making the types of modifications that you claim anyone should be able to make.

Under US law the burden is on the manufacturer to show that a modification impacted the functioning of the device/machine.

It's kind of funny, because parts DRM could be seen as the manufacturer breaking the device when a replacement could have succeeded.

Pretty sure nobody is going to go after me for fraud for putting non-VW heads on the `73 bus I used to drive around in...

If you try to sell it as an "unmodified engine" without mentioning that in writing, they absolutely could. They might not, but if it breaks in some manner that could remotely be connected to them, they could.

If the tractor is rated for 50 whatever and you chip it to run at 60 whatever and sell it without saying that you'd ever done so, then if the buyer finds damage caused by overheating or who knows what from running at 60 whatever on a 50-rated-and-softlocked engine, then you absolutely could be held liable for failing to indicate the non-factory modifications you made to the engine, even if you later 'removed' them.

(Usual disclaimer: I am not your lawyer, I will not compile citations for your review, please seek legal counsel before taking action based on my comments.)

John Deere DRM has such a bad reputation there's a lot of goodwill to be won back before people will listen to some of the good reasons for it.

Honestly, I'm a fan of price discrimination through DRM. It leads to better economic efficiency. But John Deere DRM must really be something else. I'm not even in the field and I have a negative reaction to the brand. Like they're going to nickel and dime me and then give me the run-around on fixes.

Industries are being computerised, so it's not too surprising that business practices are bleeding over.

I don't really see too much of a difference between buying a tractor from John Deere and buying a fancy SAN from Oracle. In either case you're paying a premium for the name and the associated service contract for a time-sensitive mission-critical locked-down (and to some extent black-box) function which is presumably crucial to your business's ability to generate revenue. JD have competitors, and I'd imagine that if this episode hasn't tanked their business it's due to risk-aversion from buyers (à la IBM), vendor lock-in, or customers being set in their ways.

It's also a bit like the Creative sector when Adobe moved to a subscription model; people balked and held out for a time, but ultimately they voted with their wallets and bought [subscriptions to] the magic product that could be provided by only one company on Earth, and without which they couldn't possibly continue to make art-work [commercially, in a productive manner, and in keeping with their prior experience].

I'm just cynical about how often people will knowingly make themselves reliant on a single company without reading through the small print or thinking through the implications of what is essentially entering into a long-term strategic partnership with a vastly unequal partner without a having a hedging strategy. If you can't imagine not using their products after the next refresh, you've put yourself in a very poor negotiating position.

There's a vast difference in costs, expected lifetime, depreciation, maintenance requirements, capital efficiency, time-sensitivity, and criticality to a business between a fancy SAN and a tractor.

Right-to-repair is all about people being able to repair their own products, or at the very least use certified 3rd-party mechanics, instead of being forced to go to the manufacturer for every possible problem.

I think all of those differences (time-scales, capital intensity/efficiency, credit access) are accounted for by the translation between the type of company that would buy a combine harvester Vs the kind of company that would buy a SAN. I totally get the desire from consumers for a right to repair, but ultimately I feel that this shouldn't override the freedom of economic actors to make voluntary agreements in the marketplace. And in the case of agricultural equipment I can see why some vendors would want to move to a Trusted Computing model whereby every component authenticated with every other component via HSMs, addressing the problems such as theft (which is widespread in some parts of the world) by making stolen devices/parts practically useless, which would obviously conflict with a Right to Repair (as well as any purposefully user-hostile ambitions that they had).

Free markets still need some guardrails, and the limited competition combined with the importance of agriculture makes this a complex situation.

Besides, if you have ever used a warranty recently then it’s a good bet that it was legislated to act that way. Right to repair is similar in focus to help consumers.

I disagree with the idea that free markets need guardrails for the reasons that I mentioned before: I believe that consensual agreements between people shouldn't normally be regulated by the state, and that when you take a free market and then add "guardrails" to it, it's no longer a "free" market.

All that minimum warranty legislation does is to remove the freedom that people previously had to buy products with shorter warranties, or without one. It means that they can't even buy the same product together with an optional warranty from the manufacturer, thereby ending up with a situation that's functionally identical. Warranties for practically every type of durable product existed before these changes were introduced, and people have always tended to weigh up the projected lifetime (which they can infer from factors such as the availability of manufacturer or third-party warranties or insurance), manufacturer reputation and projected total costs of ownership whenever they have bought something sufficiently expensive.

Agriculture is of course an important industry, but I don't think there's any wider threat to agriculture in this particular case, and if these practices were to create one in the future, the market would respond by punishing a company like JD (and no doubt the state would as well in light of the strategic implications). It just seems like a slow and painful realisation for parts of the industry that things have changed. Hopefully we'll now see plenty of disruption and innovation (and modding ;)).

> But John Deere DRM must really be something else.

I think it’s rather that it was introduced in a domain where users historically can (and often need) to be able to do more or less anything as many operations are extremely time-sensitive and they generally live in the ass-end of nowhere, CA. Any measure which can (and does) hamper the ability to do the thing right here right now without huge benefits to compensate is an active threat.

>I'm a fan of price discrimination through DRM.

Me too, because it means I can buy the cheapest version and unlock it for free.

This is tangential and doesn't reason with or negate the main point you're replying to in any way. Yes, John Deere does these things, but the reasoning provided by parent for why softlocks are sometimes used in the context of performance restriction and warranty support is absolutely plausible and worthy of consideration all the same. We owe it to ourselves to take care not to confuse this conversation with that cause, and to consider these views rather than distracting and derailing from them.

I wouldn't go so far as to say cars shouldn't tow, but people can and do go well beyond both the manufacturer's rated capacity and what's dictated by common sense, and as a result manufacturers are extremely conservative.

Give people the facts. Let them decide but make sure you're protected from supporting idiots.

Better than coming out of it looking like the evil dudes.

EDIT being most well known outside your sector for suing your customers is generally a bad look

It sadly doesn't work like that. Idiots are idiots. "You sold me this truck, and it doesn't work anymore.

- Well, we stated that you shouldn't do what you did...

- It doeesnnn't work !!!"

Ensue time, energy and money lost to defend yourself against idiots who don't listen.

Edit : I don't know anything about trucks or John Deere. But you can see this type of "artificial" limitation with simple unlock pretty often. For example the cpu overclocking community : the manufacturer doesn't officialy support overclocking, but they give hints and some advice if you want to do it anyway. You fry your cpu, you're on your own.

Why should you care how you're known outside your sector? People outside your sector aren't your customers, by definition.

And in many cases it's just a certification issue - my Mazda is rated to tow things while the US model with exact same transmission and engine isn't.

It's just an analogy dude

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